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He grabbed the disk, hurried across the room to the hallway and ducked into their home office. Heart racing, he dropped into the chair and fired up the computer. While it booted, Joel opened the clear plastic case, popped the disk free and fed it into the tray before he could change his mind.
    A box appeared on the screen with a list of items, files and photographs contained on the disk.
    The first several files were either links to newspaper articles online or actual newspaper reports that had been scanned and enlarged, then saved to the disk. In all but two, a photograph of Lonnie dominated the page, along with the headline describing his murder. Words like senseless and random appeared liberally throughout. LOCAL MAN VICTIM OF APPARENT RANDOM SHOOTING… VICTIM OF SENSELESS SHOOTING IDENTIFIED… MOTIVE IN LOCAL SHOOTING LIKELY ROBBERY COPS SAY… NO CLUES IN MURDER OF MAN SLAIN IN STREET…
    Despite the lurid headlines, Joel’s eyes kept returning to the photograph. It was one they’d obviously obtained from the family, a head shot of Lonnie smiling that had been cropped to remove whoever else had been in the picture with him. It looked fairly recent, as he was much older than the last time Joel had seen him, but it was hard to tell exactly how old he’d been when it was taken. Joel guessed middle forties.
    â€œWhat the hell did you get yourself into?” he asked the photograph.
    Even with the articles and photos in front of him, none of it seemed real. How could Lonnie be dead? And although Joel didn’t read every article thoroughly, he scanned them enough to know the authorities had no leads or clues as to why Lonnie had been executed or who might have done it.
    Oddly, the more Joel looked through the articles, the more vaguely familiar the whole thing sounded, and he began to wonder if he’d somehow heard about the case without realizing Lonnie was the victim. Perhaps he’d caught the tail end of a news report on TV, or had seen the story come over the wire at work. Sadly, homicides weren’t exactly big news these days, and one out of state in a city like Fall River was hardly headline news in Maine, so unless he’d heard Lonnie’s name or there were specifics of the murder that caused it to stand out, he wouldn’t have paid much attention.
    Moving the mouse, Joel closed the articles file and double-clicked the next choice. A drawing of the brand Katelyn had told him about appeared, along with a note that read: This is a sketch of the brand my father had on the back of his shoulder . It was quite small, no more than an inch in height and width, and at first glance looked like a mole or possibly a birthmark. When I made this sketch I was careful to draw it exactly as it appeared. The lines weren’t as clean as they are in the sketch but the basic design was the same as below.

    Joel minimized the disk window and opened a new one for his browser.
    A quick Google search returned examples and information on the symbol. As Katelyn said, it was a Celtic symbol known as a triskele or triskelion. It apparently symbolized life and rebirth, as she’d told him, with the use of spirals, which illustrated the cycle of life, and of the number three, a sacred number that referred to the phases of the Triple Goddess, three female deities who, in many different versions and incarnations, were worshipped by numerous cultures and appeared in several mythologies, including the Celtic, Norse and Greek traditions. Although the versions of these goddesses varied somewhat from culture to culture, there was a consistency as well, along with the basic meanings and powers of the number three in various forms of magic and numerology.
    What any of that had to do with Lonnie Scott was anyone’s guess, but how the hell could someone be branded and not know it?
    Joel closed the browser and returned his attention to the disk.
    In addition to the newspaper reports, Katelyn had included